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Optimization is about trade offs. My career has been data processing pipelines for commercial game engines. I’m quite familiar with the trade offs of compressin
by corysama 5y ago
Optimization is about trade offs. My career has been data processing pipelines for commercial game engines. I’m quite familiar with the trade offs of compressing all kinds of formats, including audio.
FLAC is at least as complex as OGG+gzip. That’s reasonable to deal with because there are libraries with many thousands of hours of effort put into them freely available.
But, trivial is trivial. Anyone who has had to deal with format support rot will sing praises of trivial.
My argument is that it’s a disappointing archive format given that any teenage coder can come within 30-50% of it in an afternoon by doing the most trivial thing possible.
Expectedly, few people here are arguing with me about archives. Instead we’re talking about streaming podcasts over 4G. Even for for high-end music, saying your personal bandwidth ethics/budget necessitates FLAC but not Opus seems more than a bit of a stretch,
in my opinion.
- raverbashing 5y agoI see If your point is that most users of FLAC would be happier with AAC/Opus etc I agree (and with a more significant savings) And yeah if you're looking at longer archival times, PCM probably makes more sense. But I think FLAC suffers way less rot than, for example WMA
- astrange 5y agoFLAC bitrots less than WAV, because WAV doesn't have checksums.
- rakoo 5y agoIf you're concerned about bitrot (and I feel everyone should be), you're going to checksum at the filesystem level, so it doesn't make a difference
- astrange 5y agoThe more the better. Sometimes there's a bit flip on the way to the streaming server… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25335936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25335936
- corysama 5y agoAs someone pointed out above, WAV bitrots results in unreported micro-blips. FLAC bitrot results in reported large-scale failure.
- kzrdude 5y agoIt bitrots at the same rate, but you detect that it happened with FLAC
- astrange 5y agoAnd then you restore it from backup/rip the CD again/download it from the original source again. And test your RAM.
- Dylan16807 5y ago> Anyone who has had to deal with format support rot will sing praises of trivial. Anyone who has had to deal with finding and recovering old data should appreciate the ability to fit significantly more on a disk. More redundancy and cheaper storage means more data survives. > teenage coder [...] in an afternoon Finding a FLAC decoder is very unlikely to take longer than that, even 50 years from now.